Validate Artefacts

Purpose / When to Activate

Activate:

• After generating Epics
• After generating Stories
• Before any Delivery planning or execution

This is the mandatory gate between Discovery and Delivery. No Story proceeds to Delivery without passing this check.

Process

Epic Validation

• Expresses a user outcome (not a feature or technical task)
• Aligns with product direction
• Avoids technical implementation detail
• Clearly scoped with no hidden assumptions

Story Validation

• Maps to a parent Epic
• Includes measurable acceptance criteria
• Is unambiguous and executable
• Respects governance rules
• Avoids solution design
• Has related_decs field in frontmatter (list or explicit empty [])
• Has skills_invoked field in frontmatter (must list the skill IDs that were read to produce it)

Cross-checks

• No Story exists without a parent Epic
• No scope contradictions with memory
• No rule violations
• Marketing artefacts (if present): hypothesis statuses align with Story acceptance criteria
• Strategy artefacts (if present): GTM phases align with Epic dependencies and gates
• Epic dependency propagation check: If the parent Epic's ## Dependencies section lists other Epics, verify that every Story's depends_on includes at least one terminal story from each listed Epic. A phasing constraint in Epic prose that is not encoded in story depends_on is a FAIL — the daemon cannot enforce prose constraints, only depends_on fields.

Skill Attestation (Base Rule #2 Enforcement)

• Every artefact (Epic, Story, PRD) must have a skills_invoked field in its frontmatter
• Epic artefacts must include generate-epics in skills_invoked
• Story artefacts must include generate-stories in skills_invoked
• PRD artefacts must include create-prd in skills_invoked
• An artefact with a missing or empty skills_invoked field is an automatic FAIL — the producing agent did not follow Base Rule #2
• This check exists because agents can produce format-correct artefacts from cached knowledge while silently skipping mandatory process steps defined in the skill file

Outputs

Validation Report — Discovery

Epics:
- E01: PASS | FAIL — reason
- E02: PASS | FAIL — reason

Stories:
- S01: PASS | FAIL — reason
- S02: PASS | FAIL — reason

Skill Attestation (Base Rule #2):
- E01: skills_invoked: [generate-epics] ✓ | MISSING ✗
- S01: skills_invoked: [generate-stories] ✓ | MISSING ✗
- S01: related_decs: [DEC-11] ✓ | MISSING ✗

Governance:
- rules respected: yes | no
- missing artefacts: none | list
- risks detected: none | list

Overall Status:
PASS | BLOCKED

Blocking Conditions

The skill MUST block progression if:

• Any Story lacks acceptance criteria
• Epics are solution-oriented rather than outcome-oriented
• Scope is unclear or ambiguous
• Governance rules are violated
• Contradictions exist between artefacts
• Any artefact is missing skills_invoked in frontmatter (Base Rule #2 violation)
• Any Story is missing related_decs in frontmatter

No partial approval. No silent warnings.

Non-Goals

This skill must NOT:

• Rewrite artefacts
• Invent missing content
• Make product decisions
• Soften failures

It validates — it does not fix. If Delivery can misunderstand it, Discovery is not done.

On BLOCKED verdict: the Discovery Agent must invoke refine-scope to resolve the identified gaps, then re-run this skill. Do not proceed to Delivery until the verdict is PASS.